Social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit are increasingly infested with bots and fake accounts, leading to significant manipulation of public discourse. These bots don’t just annoy users—they skew visibility through vote manipulation. Fake accounts and automated scripts systematically downvote posts opposing certain viewpoints, distorting the content that surfaces and amplifying specific agendas.
Before coming to Lemmy, I was systematically downvoted by bots on Reddit for completely normal comments that were relatively neutral and not controversial at all. Seemed to be no pattern in it… One time I commented that my favorite game was WoW, down voted -15 for no apparent reason.
For example, a bot on Twitter using an API call to GPT-4o ran out of funding and started posting their prompts and system information publicly.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-meme/
Bots like these are probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands. They did a huge ban wave of bots on Reddit, and some major top level subreddits were quiet for days because of it. Unbelievable…
How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??
You don’t.
You employ critical thinking skills in all interactions on the web.
I am glad clever people like yourselves are looking into this. Best of luck.
One argument in favor of bots on social media is their ability to automate routine tasks and provide instant responses. For example, bots can handle customer service inquiries, offer real-time updates, and manage repetitive interactions, which can enhance user experience and free up human moderators for more complex tasks. Additionally, they can help in disseminating important information quickly and efficiently, especially in emergency situations or for public awareness campaigns.
This reads like a chatgpt reply 😅
A ChatGPT reply is generally clear, concise, and informative. It aims to address your question or topic directly and provide relevant information. The responses are crafted to be engaging and helpful, tailored to the context of the conversation while maintaining a neutral and professional tone.
Internet is not a place for public discourse, it never was. it’s the game of numbers where people brigade discussions and make it confirm to their biases.
Post something bad about the US with facts and statistics in US centric reddit sub, youtube video or article, and see how it divulges into brigading, name calling and racism. Do that on lemmy.ml to call out china/russia. Go to youtube videos with anything critical about India.
For all countries with massive population on the internet, you’re going to get bombarded with lies, delfection, whataboutism and strawman. Add in a few bots and you shape the narrative.
There’s also burying bad press with literally downvoting and never interacting.
Both are easy on the internet when you’ve got the brainwashed gullible mass to steer the narrative.
Well, unfortunately, the internet and especially social media is still the main source of information for more and more people, if not the only one. For many, it is also the only place where public discourse takes place, even if you can hardly call it that. I guess we are probably screwed.
Just because you can’t change minds by walking into the centers of people’s bubbles and trying to shout logic at the people there, doesn’t mean the genuine exchange of ideas at the intersecting outer edges of different groups aren’t real or important.
Entrenched opinions are nearly impossibly to alter in discussion, you can’t force people to change their minds, to see reality for what it is even if they refuse. They have to be willing to actually listen, first.
And people can and do grow disillusioned, at which point they will move away from their bubbles of their own accord, and go looking for real discourse.
At that point it’s important for reasonable discussion that stands up to scrutiny to exist for them to find.
And it does.
I agree. Whenever I get into an argument online, it’s usually with the understanding that it exists for the benefit of the people who may spectate the argument — I’m rarely aiming to change the mind of the person I’m conversing with. Especially when it’s not even a discussion, but a more straightforward calling someone out for something, that’s for the benefit of other people in the comments, because some sentiments cannot go unchanged.
Did you mean unchallenged? Either way I agree, when I encounter people who believe things that are provably untrue, their views should be changed.
It’s not always possible, but even then, challenging those ideas and putting the counterarguments right next to the insanity, inoculates or at least reduces the chance that other readers might take what the deranged have to say seriously.
Give up. There is no hope we already lost. Fuck us fuck our lives fuck everything we should just die.
If they don’t blink and you hear the servos whirring, that’s a pretty good sign.
Ah yes, the 'bots.
Lemmy.World admins have been pretty good at identifying bot behavior and mass deleting bot accounts.
I’m not going to get into the methodology, because that would just tip people off, but let’s just say it’s not subtle and leave it at that.
Create a bot that reports bot activity to the Lemmy developers.
You’re basically using bots to fight bots.
While a good solution in principle, it could (and likely will) false flag accounts. Such a system should be a first line with a review as a second.
It’s reporting activity, not banning people (or bots)
Are you willing to sift through all the reports?
Cause that’s gunna be A LOT of work
Let AI do it! See? Easy!
Love that name too. Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.
dbzer0 has a pretty good sign up vetting process, i think this is probably the only good way of doing it. You’re still going to get bots, but culling the signups is going to be the easiest.
TL;DR just move over to dbzer0 and dont leave the instance :)
Also i think on sites like reddit, a lot of the downvoting is just “mass protest” theory in action, people see a comment with downvotes and then downvote it. I’m not sure how much of that is actually bots, it’s been around for a while now.
GPT-4o
Its kind of hilarious that they’re using American APIs to do this. It would be like them buying Ukranian weapons, when they have the blueprints for them already.
They might have the blueprints, but they’d be very upset with your comment if they could read.
You have to watch where you are if you call out a bot, you’ll have your comment removed and get banned. They tell you to report the bot and they’ll take care of it. Then when you report the obvious troll/bot they ban you for it. Some shady mods out there.
Ban them all.
leading to significant manipulation of public discourse
Pretending that this wasn’t already a massive issue on places like reddit since years ago, with or without bots, is a little bit disingenuous.
The problem with almost any solution is that it just pushes it to custom instances that don’t place the restrictions, which pushes big instances to be more insular and resist small instances, undermining most of the purpose of the federation.
1. The platform needs an incentive to get rid of bots.
Bots on Reddit pump out an advertiser friendly firehose of “content” that they can pretend is real to their investors, while keeping people scrolling longer. On Fediverse platforms there isn’t a need for profit or growth. Low quality spam just becomes added server load we need to pay for.
I’ve mentioned it before, but we ban bots very fast here. People report them fast and we remove them fast. Searching the same scam link on Reddit brought up accounts that have been posting the same garbage for months.
Twitter and Reddit benefit from bot activity, and don’t have an incentive to stop it.
2. We need tools to detect the bots so we can remove them.
Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.
Since the platforms are open source, instances could even set up tools that look for patterns locally, before it gets out.
It’ll be an arm’s race, but it wouldn’t be impossible.
Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.
I’d love to see some type of Adblock like crowd sourced block lists. If the growth of other platforms is any indication there will probably be a day where it would be nice to block out a large amounts of accounts. I’d even pay for it.
interesting. Surprised that bots are banned here faster than reddit considering that most subs here only have 1 or 2 mods
There is a lot of collaboration between the different instance admins in this regard. The lemmy.world admins have a matrix room that is chock full of other instance admins where they share bots that they find to help do things like find similar posters and set up filters to block things like spammy urls. The nice thing about it all is that I am not an admin, but because it is a public room, anybody can sit in there and see the discussion in real time. Compare that to corporate social media like reddit or facebook where there is zero transparency.
